Open call for Re-Directing: East Curatorial Seminar and Residency

Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art invites professionals such as curators, organisers, researchers and art managers to apply for a one-month-long residency.

Re-Directing: East Curatorial Residency is a platform for carrying out research and meetings between curators, representatives of the most interesting grass-root initiatives, and people in charge of organising artistic events from all over the world. It was launched in 2013, starting with the U–jazdowski residency programme. The notion of "re-directing"
refers here to a need to facilitate collaborations between art
initiatives which due to geopolitical conditions have not had many
opportunities to collaborate thus far.

Re–Directing: East Curatorial Residency is a peer-learning workshop, a curatorial seminar, an extended site exploration, and a research opportunity for groups of four to six individuals together with the U–jazdowski team and local participants. This curatorial residency is a platform for developing a possible working collaboration with the U–jazdowski and other parties concerned in the years to come.

The participants are expected to share their experience and understanding of respective artistic and socio-political contexts, as well as to prepare themselves for participation in this year's exploration of the topic: "hospitality."

The term hospitality is derived from the Latin word hospes meaning both a person playing host to someone, and a guest: an alien, a wanderer. Here is the beginning of an ambiguity which prevents us from determining the roles. A guest turns out to be both the saviour, and the one who disturbs order. Letting the host welcome him, he therefore offers hospitality of his own: by visiting the host’s hearth he symbolically takes it over. That is why hostis in Latin means both an alien or a visitor, and an enemy. That ambiguity was noticed and thoroughly described by Jacques Derrida who also came up with the neologism hostipitalité ("foespitality", expressing both welcome and hostility) which best displays the ambiguity in question. From the angle of hospitality we will observe contemporary artistic and curatorial practices, rooted in contemporary reality and aimed at studying, understanding and changing it.
We are going to ask questions about the efficacy of art and analyse
that issue in all the fields where it overlaps with activism, society-focused activities, artistic creation, research or education.

Within the context of the residency programs hospitality is not just a key idea, but constitutes the very starting point for any such initiative connected to notions such as journey, home, openness or domestication.

A
question also arises about the meaning of hospitality in light of
growing nationalist feelings and the ever more popular populist
discourse dividing people into "us" and "aliens". In these times, when defining the limits of households, international boundaries, laws regulating the flow of foreigners, and last but not least: regulations applied to refugees and economic migrants, is an especially urgent issue resulting in societal divisions, it is worthwhile to revisit the notion of hospitality and the paradox within that very term.

The month-long residencies:

June, 2018

Submission deadline:

February 25, 2018

The results will be announced by:

March 18th, 2018

Selection will be based on the professional excellence of the applicant’s work and their plans for sharing the benefits of the exchange with artists and institutions in their home country /site of activity. Due to the programme agenda, aimed at creating collaboration opportunities beyond the existing cultural policies, applicants must have sufficient command of English to function independently, and communicate with the U–jazdowski’s staff and other residents.

What we offer:

–Individual living space connected with working space

–A grant of 4000 PLN / approx. 1000 USD

–Reimbursement of travel costs

–Organising a customised programme of lectures, presentations and study visits in and outside Warsaw

–Organising the final seminar including participants’ presentations created collaboratively during the residency

Please note that we do not cover visa fees or insurance costs connected to visa applications.

As an international, nonpolitical, autonomous initiative, Rybon Art Center aims to promote innovation and experimentation of art among established and emerging artists and to explore the possibilities of exchanging ideas and knowledge across ethnic, regional and artistic borders.